How Real Is That Ruin? Don't Ask, the Locals Say

CHUCUITO, Peru - Inside a thick-walled rectangular ruin, a crowd of gawkers from around the world stood among rows of carved-stone posts protruding from the earth.

"Then she would sit on top," said Allison, the 11-year-old tour guide, pointing to a five-foot high, mushroom-shaped object that many say looks too much like a phallus to be anything else. Incan priests would pour chicha, or corn beer, on the woman trying to conceive, the girl explained in a robotic spiel, and determine the future child's sex by which side of the monolith the libation ran down.

Or maybe they didn't.

No one disputes that the structure, called the Inca Uyo, is hundreds of years old. Everyone further agrees that the site, in the middle of a grassy enclosure where soccer matches and bullfights were once held, has been a moneymaker for this small town on the Andean high plains, near Lake Titicaca. But what seems all but certain is that the ruin, with 86 of the carved stones inside it, is not the ancient fertility temple that many here like to say it is.

After all, a local restaurant owner can recount how, a dozen years ago, he jokingly proposed arranging the suggestive stones so the town could market the Inca Uyo as the site of ancient fertility rites. And a former director of the local branch of Peru's National Institute of Culture describes finding the first of the stones in a storage shed around the same time.

But those facts -- and exposés in the national news media here -- have not squelched the blend of archaeology, entrepreneurship and imagination that has made obscure little Chucuito a lure for globe-trotting tourists. And there is just enough of the truly ancient here to sustain the myth, and the attendant commerce it fuels, making the ruin another example of a cultural icon that is both too good to be true and too valuable to be disowned.

The Inca Uyo's walls of large interlocking stones were authenticated in the 1950's by Marion and Harry Tschopik, archaeologists who specialized in Peru. Experts also agree that the objects inside are ancient and come from local quarries. The problem is that excavations did not reveal, and most scholarly articles do not suppose, that they were ever arranged upright in rows, as they are today.

"You have a legitimate archaeological site and inside you have a lot of pieces that are architectural objects that were found and collected by the municipality many years ago," said Charles Stanish, the director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has worked extensively in Peru. "It's become a cultural icon, and people get very upset when you say it's not legitimate, because there is obviously a huge tourist industry that has been built around it."

Similarly shaped stones, featuring a cylinder connected to a square block, can be seen at such Incan sites as Machu Picchu, where they are fitted into walls so a roof can be tied to them.

Rolando Paredes, the regional director of the National Institute of Culture in nearby Puno, explained that facts became twisted when well-intentioned but misinformed people took advantage of Chucuito's abundance of these objects. Mr. Paredes, who would like to return the site to its condition before the stones were placed inside it, said he could not explain why some of the stones include a bulbous end not characteristic of those at other ruins. But, he said, to presume they were used in phallic worship is a "distortion of the truth."

A linguistic coincidence further complicates matters.

In Aymara, the dominant Indian language in Chucuito, the word "uyo" means field. In Quechua, the language spoken by the Incas and many Peruvians today, "uyo" means penis.

According to Mr. Paredes, the place designation Inca Uyo was always an Aymara name. But others disagree. "It is an Incan site," said Enrique Morro, who previously held Mr. Paredes's post. "Why is it so hard to believe the Quechua word is correct?"

Mr. Morro explained that if people want to know how the stones arrived inside the old walls, they need look no further than him. He said he discovered two footlong stones in a storage shed about 12 years ago.

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"It is impossible to think of anything else," Mr. Morro said of the stones' phallic shape. He recounted how, following his discovery, he surveyed the town and found the rest of the larger stones distributed in yards and in houses. He collected the materials and placed them inside the Inca Uyo, he said. Soon after, local authorities began charging admission to what they called a museum.

"The placement of the statues is not important," he said. "It is a guess of how the site may have looked in the past." He said he thought the stones had been created not to induce female fertility, but for men's sake. "Men have had virility problems since the beginning of the world, since the land was hot," he said.

Juan Luis Nuñez Geldres owns a restaurant, Tio Juan, adjacent to the site and is the former owner of the storage shed where Mr. Morro found the stones. He said that artifacts were stored on his property following an excavation in the 1970's, and that he used one of the stones to build a fountain in his restaurant. Later, he said, while the shed was being transferred to a new owner during a period of agrarian reform, he was drinking one night with the town's mayor and other local authorities in front of the fountain. He joked that someone should move the stones inside the Inca Uyo and arrange them to create a fertility temple.

"People blame me for starting this story," Mr. Geldres said, "but I am comfortable because now the people have opportunities to work in the hotels and sell their handicrafts."

Indeed, many in town are emphatic that not too many questions should be asked about the site.

"Don't lie that the Inca Uyo is not real, not original," demanded Rina Catacora Cruz, the president of the Association of Artisans of the Inca Uyo. She said she was worried that if Mr. Paredes got his way and altered the configuration of the ruin, her group's business would plummet.

Some travelers visiting Chucuito no doubt suspect there is something fishy about the Inca Uyo. Lonely Planet's "South America on a Shoestring" calls a visit "good for giggles." Sally Jones, who was visiting from Wrexham, Wales, with a friend on a sightseeing trip, said, "You do wonder if it is historical, considering there isn't even a signpost."

There is a long history, of course, of spurious attractions. Fake relics and their shrines lured pilgrims in medieval times; that skeptics found them dubious did not necessarily disperse the crowds.

Here in Chucuito, moreover, there is something genuine, and unique, that archaeologists have not fully explained: Why are there so many of these mysteriously shaped stones in this area, when they are not common to other South American sites? Like the linguistic coincidence between Aymara and Quechua words, this fact sticks in skeptics' teeth.

"The question is, When were these stones made and why?" said Edmundo de la Vega, an archaeology professor at the Universidad Nacional del Altiplano in Puno. "Right now no one has the answer, and so there is only speculation."

Correction: March 29, 2006, Wednesday An article in The Arts on March 21 about a ruin in Peru that some people say was a fertility temple misidentified the decade in which two archaeologists, Marion and Harry Tschopik, authenticated its walls as ancient. It was the 1940's, not the 1950's.